upon between them for some time. Morgan perforce had to live at home,
and, as time went by, this very fact caused him a great deal of
misery. Perhaps the very magnificence of his surroundings made matters
worse for him.

His mother, too, was against him, and, after awhile she seemed to
expend all the time she could spare from playing the role of _grande
dame_ in the county, in egging on his father against him. The sense of
her injustice embittered him, for he knew he could not fairly be
accused of spending his time unprofitably. He was studying perhaps
harder than he would have done at college, for he was a student almost
as much as he was poet. Of recreation, though, he had no stint. He
rode, fished, swam and boated; but always alone, for his instinct made
for solitude. With his brother he was not unfriendly, but there was no
intimate sympathy between the two.

During the years that followed there were many fallings-out and
reconciliations between father and son. If the banker had been
entirely able to rid his mind of the plans he had so long cherished
for his son, he would have been quite content that the latter should
go through life as a gentleman of wealth and leisure. But he was
wedded to the business to which he had given the best energies of his
life, and the idea that Morgan must eventually take his place in it
amounted almost to an obsession. A reconciliation always made Morgan
happy, for its own sake quite as much as for the belief that his
ambition was being recognised. Estrangement and friction were always
terrible things to him and caused him unspeakable suffering.

His letter to Ingram was the culmination. It was sincere and expressed
exactly what he felt. The immediate cause of the mood which prompted
it had been Archibald's putting before him again all the old
propositions and his letting it be clearly seen he had never really
abandoned them.

Then followed a few months of happiness in London. At last he felt
master of his own destiny--free of all that had vexed him, free to
succeed. But the routine of his days was much the same as before. He
studied and wrote and dreamed. Now and again he was allowed to come
and chat with Ingram. Friends of the family made him welcome at their
houses whenever he chose to emerge from the isolation that was natural
to him. At the Medhurst's, in particular, he was almost one of the
family.

But, some time after Morgan's leaving home, Archibald Druce retired
from